Thinking Small

Grabbed the Fracture demo, not because it was an especially bright blip on an increasingly crowded radar but because it was available, and also because this guy’s excitement is fucking infectious. There is literally nothing I get that excited about. There’s a few more trailers out there, maybe they answer some of our urgent questions, but it is not the policy of this site to take reality into account.

There’s another round of Q&A up for Star Trek Online, and just as before I’ve emerged from it strangely empty. Are we approaching that grim and ghastly horizon, where I must purchase a magazine to learn about a videogame? Are they still chipping those into granite? If so, I must avail myself of a wheelbarrow.

Near the end of my vigilante career in City of Heroes, I stopped playing the game entirely. I simply had too much XP debt accrued to make any evening of ordinary play worthwhile. Even so, I’d still fly from place to place, finding heroes I hadn’t seen before and drinking in their character profiles. I’ve written about it before, but a surprising number of players took the time to establish (sometimes) amazingly complex origins, and it was clear from the text when they were attaching this character to their friends’ characters, or even other characters they had created, establishing tangled and elaborate superhuman dynasties.

I spent a lot of time with the Starfleet Command series, a broken, beautiful thing, and on those occasions when its online Dynaverse component actually worked I would take my custom ships online. Proud vessels like the USS Invincible or the USS Indefatigable, craft whose service life was often less than an hour. I still loved them, even with plasma boiling out from their nacelles, because I knew them.

The one thing these questionnaires do communicate is that they understand the power of letting players establish ownership, and (on paper) Star Trek Online lets you do this on several discrete levels, from ships on down to the guy working the warp core. It’s a start.